- UK release: June 2017
- Director: Alex Kurtzman · Writers: David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman
- Studio / distributor: Universal Pictures; Dark Universe
- Genre: Fantasy action adventure / monster reboot · Runtime: 110 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible, Top Gun) as Nick Morton; Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service, Star Trek Beyond) as Princess Ahmanet; Annabelle Wallis (Peaky Blinders) as Jenny Halsey; Russell Crowe (Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind) as Dr Henry Jekyll
- Rotten Tomatoes: 16% critics / 35% audience · My rating: 6 / 10
Universal owns the oldest monsters in cinema, the Dracula and Frankenstein and Mummy pictures that built the studio in the 1930s, and it has watched Marvel turn a shelf of comic characters into the most profitable machine in Hollywood. So here is the plan, announced before a frame has been shot: a Dark Universe, a connected web of films in which those creatures share a world the way the Avengers do. The Mummy is the launch title, and it is asked to do two jobs at once. It has to be a Tom Cruise action picture that stands on its own, and it has to be the foundation stone of a franchise that does not exist yet. The strain of carrying both is visible from the opening reel.
The setup
Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) is a soldier and part-time looter working the edges of a war zone, the sort of likeable rogue who insists he is a liberator of antiquities rather than a thief. A misjudged firefight uncovers a buried Egyptian tomb, and the archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) recognises it for what it is: not a tomb meant to keep someone in, but a prison meant to keep something out. Inside is Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), a princess who was promised a throne, had it taken from her, and made a bargain with a god of death to get it back. Nick disturbs her rest, and she wakes with a claim on him. From there he is pulled towards a secret organisation that has been quietly cataloguing monsters, and towards a curse he keeps trying to outrun. I will leave the shape of that organisation and what it wants with him spoiler-light.
The cast
Cruise does the thing he is reliably good at, which is run, fall, drive and react to enormous events with the bafflement of a man who genuinely cannot believe his luck has turned. There is a rooted set-piece early on, a cargo plane in trouble, where his commitment to doing it for real gives the film a jolt of the old physical conviction. The trouble is the part. Nick is written as a self-interested chancer who must learn to care, and the film keeps flinching from letting him be properly unpleasant, so the arc never lands. Sofia Boutella is the most interesting presence on screen, all coiled physicality and genuine menace, and she deserves a film built around her rather than a launch event built around the brand. Annabelle Wallis is handed the exposition and little else. Russell Crowe turns up as Dr Henry Jekyll, running the monster-cataloguing outfit, and spends his scenes selling a mythology the film has not earned the right to set up, a trailer for other films pretending to be a character.
The craft
Alex Kurtzman comes from the writing and producing side, and the film has the slightly anonymous gloss of something assembled by committee. Ben Seresin’s photography is handsome enough, the desert and the drowned London underworld both look the part, and Brian Tyler’s score does its work without leaving a mark. The action is competent and occasionally better than that, but the tone never settles. The film wants to be a horror picture, a globe-trotting adventure, a buddy comedy and a universe-building prologue, and it switches between them so often that none of them gathers any weight. The genuine scares are undercut by quips, the comedy is undercut by lore, and the adventure keeps stopping so someone can explain the wider plan. A monster movie should know whether it wants to frighten you or thrill you. This one keeps asking.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy from 1999, which knew exactly what it was: a swaggering Saturday-matinee adventure with Brendan Fraser grinning through the danger and no interest at all in a shared universe. It was lighter, surer and a great deal more fun. The newer film is closer in spirit to Van Helsing and Dracula Untold, earlier attempts to drag these old monsters into a modern blockbuster register, and it shares their problem of seriousness without substance. The other shadow over it is Cruise’s own Mission: Impossible run, where the stunt work serves a story that actually moves. Here the spectacle is in service of a sales pitch, and you feel the difference.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been brutal, with the Rotten Tomatoes score sitting at a punishing 16%, and audiences are warmer but still unconvinced at 35%. The recurring charge is the right one: the film is so busy founding a franchise that it forgets to be a film, and the horror and the adventure both suffer for it. That is fair. Where I part company is on the severity. A 16% reads as a disaster, and this is not a disaster. It is a misfire with real pleasures in it, a strong central monster, a couple of properly mounted set-pieces and a star still willing to throw himself down a flooded tunnel for your entertainment. That is not nothing.
Verdict
This is the kind of film that is more interesting to diagnose than to watch, but it is not the catastrophe its reception suggests. When it lets Cruise run and lets Boutella stalk, it works. When it stops to lay franchise pipe, it dies on its feet. There is a decent adventure trapped inside the corporate machinery, and the maddening thing is how often you can see it. I would not rush back to it, but I was never bored, and the good twenty minutes are good enough to remember. Frank verdict: a handsome, confused, over-engineered blockbuster that is better than 16% and nowhere near as good as it needed to be. 6⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the Dark Universe this film was built to launch never arrived. The planned slate, an Invisible Man, a Bride of Frankenstein, a Wolf Man and the rest, was quietly shelved after The Mummy underperformed, and Universal later pivoted to standalone monster pictures instead, beginning with a low-budget The Invisible Man (2020) that found the focus this film lacked. The Mummy is now best remembered as the franchise that died on the launch pad. It streams on the usual digital platforms depending on region, and turns up on disc in 4K.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for sustained threat, horror, brief strong violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Blood spurts onto a woman’s face when it is implied she is killing people. There are some fight scenes featuring hand-to-hand combat. Stronger moments include a shooting and a stabbing. A man is kicked in the face, causing a blood spurt, and a man digs his fingers into another man’s rib cage.
Threat and horror: An Egyptian mummy comes to life and attacks humans by sucking the life out of them and turning them into zombies. People are chased by the undead and try to fight them off. There are a few jump moments.
Language: There is infrequent moderate bad language (‘wanker’) as well as milder bad language including uses of ‘son-of-a-bitch’ and ‘bloody’.
Sex: There are some mild sex references when two people have a conversation about spending a night together and one of them refers to ‘a very long and satisfying evening’.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
